dirt selling a handful of plantain bananas, sandals made from recycled car tyres, a couple of battered paperbacks or a few empty tins and bottles or scraps of fabric that must have been reclaimed from the city dump. There was also a metal worker there, his hammers beating out a tinny rhythm as he pounded pieces of scrap metal and flattened tin to make cooking pots and water carriers, while a sweating boy, perhaps his son, pumped the bellows of his primitive forge. Shepherd had never seen such abject poverty and understood why the West had been forced to intervene.
The road was a wasteland of potholes and crisscrossed by tank tracks that had torn up the surface. The Landcruiser bounced and jolted over the ruts as they drove on. Every mile or so they passed the rusting wrecks of vehicles, crashed or ambushed, that had been bulldozed off the road.
As they rounded the head of Aberdeen Creek and turned onto Lumley Beach Road, the views improved dramatically. The palm-fringed, pristine white sands stretched away from them for miles, towards the lighthouse at Cape Sierra Leone and Man of War Bay. The beaches looked as beautiful as any in the world but in this war-torn country there were no tourists to enjoy them and they saw not a soul as they drove along.
‘Looking on the bright side, no one’s going to be hogging the sunbeds around the pool,’ said Geordie.
They passed a few mud-and-thatch huts and an occasional concrete building on the beach side of the road, many of them with sun-faded signs advertising beer and Coke, though they looked more like jails than bars, with steel shutters covering the doors and iron bars across the windows. Almost all were closed and shuttered, vandalised or derelict, many pitted with the marks of gunfire, and with smoke-blackened windows. Several were completely burnt out.
The Tradewinds Hotel proved to be an ugly two-storey concrete block with a flat roof and the familiar bullet-marks on its stained facade. ‘Bloody hell,’ Jock said as he caught sight of it. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a building anywhere in Sierra Leone that hasn’t been shot up.’
‘At least this one’s open for business,’ said Shepherd. ‘Though I’m guessing there won’t be much in the way of room service.’
‘Mate, I’ll be happy if the bed’s got sheets and a pillow,’ said Jimbo.
The owner of the hotel, a paunchy Lebanese with a thick black moustache and slicked-back hair, eased himself out of a cane chair in the lobby, beneath a ceiling fan that turned with a slow, rusty squeak. As they watched him fumble behind the counter for the room keys, they could hear a steady dripping sound from down the corridor. ‘At least we know the water supply’s working,’ Jimbo said with a wink.
‘Even better than that,’ Jock said. ‘There’s a bar as well, and I can definitely see a bottle of whisky on the shelf.’
Geordie grinned. ‘That’s you sorted then, but what are the rest of us going to drink?’
‘Ask someone who cares,’ Jock said. ‘Right, shit, shower and shave and back in the bar in twenty minutes.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Shepherd.
Shepherd let himself into his second-floor room, trying hard not to speculate on how many people might already have slept in the bed since the sheets were last changed. There was a small balcony, but there were bullet holes in the shutters, which did not seem a particularly good omen. He dragged his bed as far from the windows as it would go, exposing a thick carpet of dust where it had been standing. The tiles in the bathroom were cracked and the walls mildewed, and when he turned on the light, there was a rustling sound like dry leaves stirring in a breeze, as streams of brown cockroaches scuttled across the floor and disappeared beneath the bath and into cracks in the walls.
He turned on the shower, more in hope than expectation. To his surprise a stream of brackish water flowed, albeit erratically, and he took his first